3/2 Fractional Quantum Hall Plateau in Confined Two-Dimensional Electron Gas

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of a 3/2 fractional quantum Hall plateau in a confined two-dimensional electron gas, revealing new edge physics and implications for non-Abelian statistics and quantum computation.

Contribution

It presents the first observation of a 3/2 FQH plateau in a confined 2DEG, highlighting the impact of lateral confinement on fractional quantum Hall states.

Findings

3/2 FQH plateau quantized at (h/e^2)/(3/2) within 0.02%

Plateau persists up to 300 mK

Lateral confinement influences edge structure and excitations

Abstract

Even-denominator fractional quantum Hall (FQH) states, such as 5/2 and 7/2, have been well known in a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) for decades and are still investigated as candidates of non-Abelian statistics. In this paper, we present the observation of a 3/2 FQH plateau in a single-layer 2DEG with lateral confinement at a bulk filling factor of 5/3. The 3/2 FQH plateau is quantized at (h/e^2 )/(3/2) within 0.02%, and can survive up to 300 mK. This even-denominator FQH plateau may imply intriguing edge structure and excitation in FQH system with lateral confinement. The observations in this work demonstrate that understanding the effect of the lateral confinement on the many-body system is critical in the pursuit of important theoretical proposals involving edge physics, such as the demonstration of non-Abelian statistics and the realization of braiding for fault-tolerant quantum computation.